Yesterday I decided that I’m sick of waiting for some miracle cure for my bad shoulder and neck to take a Yoga class. I just got up and decided to go. Mind you I can do forty minutes on the elliptical machine and still walk afterward. I do stretches and balancing at home. And every one in the freaking universe tells me Yoga is awesome! It’s the nectar of life, the brain food of geniuses, the reason to live! Yoga cures stress and writer’s block all at once! Plus its low impact! There’s no downside.
I told Wizard all this.
He’s like… “I think they’re talking about normal people.”
I whipped around. “What does that mean?”
He threw up his hands. “Nothing. Go. You’ll be awesome. I’ll see you when you get back.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought he said. So I go to the Yoga class at my gym. It’s a big room with laminated wood floors and WAY too many mirrors. But there’s only about 10 people in the class so plenty of space. This should be pretty easy, right?
15 minutes into Yoga I was sweating buckets and slipping on my mat. I looked up into the wall of mirrors noticed my hair had frizzed and my tongue was hanging out like this:
Actual picture of Jen in Yoga
But I wasn’t giving up. There were people in there who were decades older than me!
30 minutes later I pushed up to a contorted hip twist with an extra shot of try this sucker…and my foot slipped on the mat. But I caught myself.
Whew! That was close.
One second later I felt a pop. Right in…I kid you not…my butt muscle.
Ummm…oops? My right side, where my butt meets my thigh, sent out a rays of stinging pain in all directions. Then I did a real “tree pose,” the kind where I crashed to the ground on my side. The instructor saw me, but I pushed up to sit on my knees like I was fine. I sat there for a second, looking at the door and thinking two things:
RUN LIKE HELL
and
DON’T TELL WIZARD I HURT MYSELF
All the while the gentle strains of mind control muscle kept playing, and the human pretzels kept flowing into different physically impossible contortions. And all of a sudden, I asked myself, “Are you really giving up because you pulled a muscle? Seriously? Oh hell no.”
I finished that Yoga class. I did every freaking pose, modifying for the fact that I’d just discovered a new butt muscle. And no lie, after the class the instructor made a point of telling me how good I did.
BHAHAHAHA!!! I think she felt sorry for me.
After that, I went home, sat my butt down on one bag of ice and had another ice pack over my shoulder. While downing ibuprofen with coffee, I described the torture to Wizard in slow and excruciating detail, each and every moment.
Then Wizard said, “So you’re done now, right? You’re not going back to Yoga next week?”
“What?” I gaped at him, confused. Whatever gave him the idea I’d give up?
This is a true story, and this is how I also write my books. I make mistakes, get lost, fall down, but I throw some ice on the pain and keep writing.
Happy Friday all! Hope you have a great weekend!
P.S. I really hope I can get out of bed today